Facebook Growth Takes A Plunge But Canadian Facebook Use Still Growing

eMarketer’s prediction regarding social networking hitting a plateau appears to have been confirmed as Facebook is witnessing a huge drop in traffic IN North America.

It was reported by Inside Facebook, the company gained 13.9 million over April but then only 11.8 million more people over May. However, the typical month in the last year showed growth of at least 20 million new users . The difference this time is that the drop is being seen consistently over a period of months, which is definitely new. Also, North America lost nearly 6 million users while United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all lost 100,000 users.

In other stats by Social bakers, Facebook is growing faster in Asia and Europe than America. In fact, Europe has toppled North America to become number one with 205 million users against North America’s 203 million.

What’s behind this?
Whether it’s competion or simply that Facebook users are tired of socialising on its platform. While privacy has always been the concern, it was never enough of an issue to deter  users from using it. What could probably be deduced from the data is that the rise of smaller and niche social networks like Tagged seemed to have had some effect on the giant. Facebook does appear to be less attractive to college students who are now exploring new ways to share and socialize. Take My Yearbook for example, which has been growing at incredible speed.

What’s Next?
Facebook  has to look beyond North America and also Europe. It is pretty clear that if the company plans to reach the billion figure mark then it has to expand in countries that have been late adopters (Brazil, Indonesia, India and of course China). With combined populated of over two billion and growth rate of over 5% per month, adding another 300 million won’t be much of a problem for the company.

So WIIFM?
All the rise and fall of Facebooks' phenominal growth may seem dramatic on some occasions but local markets in Canada continue to have steady growth. So please remember there is still a market of over 18 Million Facebook users in Canada that Facebook can give you a piece of....so while your thinking about that check out these stats on Canadian Facebook users on the link below... (note: the graph shows 18M users currently while they state in print above the graph the Canadian total is 16M)

For Canadian Facebook stats click here...